Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  Behind Kilpatrick’s column, Major General Joseph Wheeler entered Waynesboro just after sunset. “The town was in flames,” he recounted, “but with the assistance of my staff and escort we succeeded in staying the flames and in extinguishing the fire in all but one dwelling, which was so far burned that it was impossible to save it.” Wheeler planned some nasty surprises for the Federals in the morning; meantime, he would continue to badger the rear guard, “to keep them in line of battle all night.”

  While Wheeler continued to act as if the enemy were itching to turn toward Augusta, Kilpatrick’s intentions were in a different direction. With U.S prisoners gone from Camp Lawton, there was no longer any compelling reason to keep his command exposed to Wheeler’s assaults. Accordingly, as the Federal reported, “I deemed it prudent to retire to our infantry.” He intended his next day’s march to close on Louisville, where he expected to reach the protective umbrella of Sherman’s main columns. That was, if Joe Wheeler would let him go.

  Monday, November 28, 1864

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 1864

  The three cities directly under Sherman’s shadow reacted to the threat in different ways. The mood in Augusta was positively bullish. “The enemy’s position is becoming developed at last,” announced the Augusta Register. “Whatever may be his opinion of our strength, we are conscious that our force is not only able to protect stated points, but will be able to meet him in open combat, and make him rue the day he toyed with the iron spirit of the Southern people.” The paper’s editors also heaped praise on Lieutenant General William J. Hardee. “‘Old Reliable’ is too well informed of SHERMAN’S tactics to be outwitted by him,” they boasted. “He is one of the most vigilant and energetic officers in the service, and knows how and when to operate.”

  In contrast to Hardee’s studied equanimity, Major General Samuel Jones, the officer commanding in Charleston, was in a near panic. Once more today he fired off a telegram to Richmond reiterating his imperative want of reinforcements. “I cannot too strongly urge my need of them,” he pleaded. This prompted a stern and immediate rebuke from the Confederate secretary of war. “It is impossible to afford re-enforcement,” James Seddon answered in no uncertain terms. “You must rely on your own resources.”

  Self-reliance marked the tone of a proclamation issued under this date by the mayor of Savannah, Richard D. Arnold. “The time has come when every male who can shoulder a musket can make himself useful in defending our hearths and homes,” it read. “Our city is well fortified, and the old can fight in the trenches as well as the young, and a determined and brave force can, behind intrenchments, successfully repel the assaults of treble their number.”

  Combined Left/Right Wings

  Sherman’s headquarters moved fifteen miles today, departing Tennille on a rambling course that jogged southeast for two or three miles, then picked up the old Savannah Road heading northeast, before turning southeast again to camp in the field roughly three miles outside Davisboro, not far from New Hope Church. The General was still gingerly coming upon the Ogeechee River with the Fourteenth and Twentieth Corps closing on Louisville, even as the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Corps marched in parallel a few miles to the south. “Thus we approached [the] Ogeechee [River] at two points,” wrote Major Hitchcock, now a more confident strategist, “one column at Louisville, which is ten to twelve miles above [the] railroad Bridge,—and [the] other…coming towards [the] railroad Bridge across the Ogeechee which is at Station 10.”*

  The command party traveled “on sandy roads, and through woods chiefly pine, though as yet we still see oaks and other trees,” continued Hitchcock in his travelogue mode. “Good farms along the traveled roads, and crops have all been good.” They crossed paths with Major General Frank Blair, commanding the Seventeenth Corps, who showed them some captured correspondence from soldiers in Hood’s army representing a low state of morale and generally poor conditions. If Sherman gave any thought to what was happening to George Thomas in Tennessee, he gave no indication.

  The officers lunched at a farm owned and occupied by one J. C. Moye, who received a guard detail to protect his residence; everything else on the place that could feed man or beast was appropriated. This night Sherman enjoyed a conversation with General Blair and two of his principal subordinates. An ever more admiring Hitchcock found the General to be “one of the most entertaining men I ever heard talk—varied, quick, original, shrewd, full of anecdote, experience and general information.”

  Just about all the railroad wrecking this day fell to the Twentieth Corps, which tackled the line beginning west of Davisboro, continuing east to Spier’s Turnout. * Much of the right-of-way, recorded a Connecticut soldier, “runs through a dismal swamp on a bed of transported sand.” “We tried various modes of destruction,” contributed a Massachusetts man; “tipping the whole track over, passing the men down from left to right & keeping it going like a row of bricks & then piling up the ties & lifting the whole length of stringer & rail on top to burn the whole; lighting a continuous fire of pitch rails along both sides of the stringer & rail to burn & warp them. This was very effectual as the rails, being laid very closely together, sprang up from the stringer, drawing out the spikes, & bent & twisted themselves very considerably. Some of the reg[imen]ts, who had axes, cut the stringer where the joint of the rails came & laid the lengths on fires. This is, on the whole, the best way.”

  “The troops moved in haste save at the creek crossings where army wagons and teams, horsemen and infantry were blended in a confused jam from which a constant stream emerging closed hurriedly with the fast receding column,” contributed a Wisconsin soldier in the Twentieth Corps. The toughest marching was turned in this day by the Fifteenth Corps, which, constituting the extreme right flank of the army, picked its way along roads that were only visible on maps. “I think the Div[ision] has been lost nearly all day,” groused an Illinoisan. “We have followed old Indian trails 4/5 of the time.” To another midwesterner, this was a “wilderness. It is all large pine timber and no underbrush, only along the ravines. The land is very sandy…and thickly covered with a kind of grass resembling long thin wire. It is 10 to 30 inches high and very hard to walk through—slippery and tough.”

  “In making the order of march for the day the map of Georgia was consulted and the right[most] division was directed to move to ‘Johnson’s,’” explained an officer. “General Howard and staff moved with this division. We soon found the column was moving more south than appeared proper, and no man we could find, white or black, had ever heard of Johnson’s. We were in Johnson county and assuming the county seat was intended, we found that was Wrightsville and moved the column there.” The result of this confusion was that one brigade (the Second, Colonel Robert N. Adams’s) spent the night at Wrightsville, while the rest of Corse’s division bivouacked along the Little Ohoopee River, seven miles northeast. (What caused the whole foul-up was, according to an Ohio soldier: “Colonel Adams followed General Corse, who was following General Howard.”)

  Once the Right Wing commander managed to sort things out, the wayward brigade was directed east to rendezvous with the rest of its division near Swainsboro on November 29. * “These roads are generally mere trails and in many cases they are barely, if at all, distinguishable by a person unaccustomed to the country in riding on them,” acknowledged the weary but wiser staff officer.

  The units operating along and north of the railroad reported a number of brief sharp encounters with Rebel cavalry, perhaps from the same force that should have burned Fenn’s Bridge. When a squad of mounted Confederates made a dash at the 137th New York, the “men immediately fell in, and taking arms, were ordered to load, the first time since leaving Atlanta,” reported the regiment’s commander. Another such strike caught Private William James Lockhart of the 22nd Wisconsin and his buddy Jotham Scudder lugging that night’s intended supper, a large Muscovy duck. Lockhart was veteran enough to keep his priorities straight. When his buddy asked what they should do with the weighty
bird, Lockhart replied, “Hang onto it until the ball actually opens for us, then if it comes to that we can drop it after we are marched close to the front.” His experience served him well, for his regiment was never called into action, leaving the men to enjoy a fine duck dinner.

  Six miles east of Davisboro, elements of the Twentieth Corps swept across the Herschel V. Johnson plantation.* The owner, a past Georgia governor (active Confederate senator and no friend of the current Executive Mansion occupant), was not at home when the Yankees called. “Large quantities of stores were found buried on it & much plunder was carried off by the stragglers ahead of our column,” recorded a New Jerseyman. That was only part of the story. According to a Wisconsin soldier, the “foragers got lots of stuff to eat here but not finding the usual amount of finery in the house the[y] suspected that it was hid some where. The officer in charge of the party persuaded an aged darkie by threatening to hang him up (rather persuasive argument) to tell him where the stuff was. The Ex-Gov[ernor] had worked it pretty sharp. He took up a bed of cabbage in his garden, there dug holes and deposited his goods in boxes and barrels in said holes, and then set the cabbages out nicely again. But it wouldn’t work.” A New Jersey officer mused that Johnson “must have lived like an old Baron on the grand old feudal lines and having almost all of the privileges of those saucy old fellows.”

  Louisville, Georgia’s state capital immediately prior to Milledgeville, was the point of concentration for the two Fourteenth Corps divisions, pressing in from the north, with a Twentieth Corps division following the wagon road from Sandersville. Both found their routes blocked. The problem confronting the Twentieth Corps was a replay of Buffalo Creek; the river bridge gone along with another seven smaller ones carrying ramps over tributaries and marshes. “Here we had to lay our pontoons for a bridge, the rebels having burned the bridge & blew up the embankment through the swamp over which the road lay,” recorded a Twentieth Corps Connecticut diarist.

  A section of the 58th Indiana under Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Moore reached the site at about 1:00 P.M. The engineer estimated that between the river pontoon of 100 feet and approaches, he had to repair about three-quarters of a mile of roadway. The officer commanding the division reported the “pontoniers and pioneers at work all afternoon.” In some cases the secondary bridges were entirely bypassed via corduroy lanes pushed through an adjacent swamp. Watching the workers overcome the obstructions, an Indiana volunteer was suitably impressed. “The facility in crossing this country of many rivers and insufficient roads was one of the hardest blows inflicted on the Confederates,” he proclaimed.

  Just to the north of Louisville, the adventurous Major James A. Connolly was once more seeking action. He had attached himself to a small scouting party that was operating about an hour ahead of the Third Division, Fourteenth Corps. Connolly and his crew had hoped to secure the Rocky Comfort Creek bridge into Louisville, but this time their luck ran out. When he arrived at the span right after daylight, Connolly found it ablaze. “I…was probably 20 minutes too late and couldn’t save it,” he reflected. “I could have reached it in time, but as we found the road barricaded about every mile by fences built across it, we had to approach very cautiously for fear of an ambuscade; and in this way we lost time.”

  With only five others with him, Connolly had no intention of trying to secure the opposite bank; so while one of them carried word back to the main column, the rest hunkered down to observe. When the leading infantry reached Connolly a little after 8:00 A.M., two regiments (23rd Missouri and 89th Ohio), in the words of one soldier, “crossed the river on timbers of the bridge, still standing although burning.” According to an Ohioan in the 105th Regiment, the creek was “a deep stream, full of snags, with swampy banks, making very bad passing.” A section of the 58th Indiana under Major William A. Downey arrived to construct the crossing. “It was a very long bridge (50 yards) spanning a swamp & river,” recalled an Illinois soldier. Passage over the creek would not be ready until nearly 4:00 P.M.

  This did not bode well for Louisville. The burned span was but a minor impediment for foot soldiers, so even as pontoniers and pioneers set to work, squads of men roamed the town with time on their hands. The result was a rough handling. “The boys made quite a raze,” summed up a Missouri man. “Books, clothing, cutlery, medicine, etc., etc., were brought into camp in profusion,” testified a Minnesotan. “It mattered not that the articles taken were of no use to anyone, they will take them anyway.” “One fellow played on the piano while his comrades danced a jig on the top of the instrument and then he drove an axe through it,” reported an Ohio infantryman.

  Several sources recount that a female resident had spat on one of the first Yankees to enter Louisville. No one who set down the incident actually witnessed it, making it most likely a bogus justification for the destructive excesses of the Union soldiers. One Indiana soldier may well have put his finger on the more probable motive when he confided to his diary: “We burnt some of the town[,] just a little to keep our hand in you know.” “I never can sanction such proceedings,” wrote a conscious-stricken Illinoisan in his journal, “believing that no man who ever was a gentleman could enter a private house & disgrace our uniform and the service as many of our men did today.” “I [am] getting ashamed to see such outrages committed,” declared one thoroughly riled staff officer, “and made up my mind to sho[o]t the first scoundrel whom I may catch.”

  According to Brevet Major General Jefferson C. Davis’s official report, it was just “before night the troops and trains were passing both streams into their camps around Louisville. The road, running as it does here through an immense cypress swamp, required considerable labor to put and keep it in condition for the passage of trains, and it was not until noon the next day that the entire column succeeded in getting into its camps.” Not in his report was a fortunately nonlethal case of friendly fire occurring when Fourteenth and Twentieth Corps patrols, prowling their respective sides of the river, opened fire on each other. A bemused Indiana engineer recorded that “old general [James D.] Morgan run in and put a stop to the firing though they were so far apart that they did not hurt any one.”

  Also not reported was another incident just after dark, when the town jail, located near Davis’s headquarters and supposedly guarded by the 34th Illinois, burst into flames. A staff officer he sent to investigate had words with the 34th’s commander. “General Davis then summoned the combatants and delivered them a lecture the purport of which we did not learn,” recorded an Illinoisan. “Neither did we discover who fired the jail.”

  Cavalry

  Confederate Major General Joseph Wheeler was in his element. Behind him were civilian centers to be protected; in front was the enemy to be vanquished. Well before morning he had portions of his command in motion seeking to encircle and envelop the Yankee position, while he waited for first light to press the foe’s rear guard. Marring this otherwise perfect picture was a heavy fog; “so much so,” reported a New York Herald man with the Union expedition, “that we could not see fifty yards in advance.” Wheeler’s opposite number, Brigadier General H. Judson Kilpatrick, had no intention of waiting around for the Rebels to come charging. With his main mission of rescuing Federal POWs scrubbed, and his men having ripped up enough railroad track to record it as mission accomplished, it was time to find sanctuary.

  Kilpatrick had his men marching well before dawn, still heading south from Waynesboro along the railroad. It would be another leapfrog operation, with one brigade holding a barricaded line until the other passed through it to establish a new position a few miles farther along, then falling back itself to repeat the process. Just to be certain that the enemy was actually in his rear, Kilpatrick pushed out two reconnaissance battalions. As soon as they encountered Wheeler’s force, the battalions promptly fell back through the rear guard, closely pressed by the Rebels. Kilpatrick himself held station with the shielding units—elements of the 8th Indiana Cavalry and 9th Michigan Cavalry.

  H
is prompt departure this morning effectively negated Wheeler’s effort to encompass his command. The Rebel general sent two units to get in front of the Yankees. Hung up by the darkness, unfamiliar with the roads, and plain exhausted, the pair were unable to close the circle. They almost netted a big prize, however, as the equally weary Federals mishandled the tricky leapfrog maneuver. The officer holding one barricade, losing count of the units passing through, prematurely withdrew, leaving Kilpatrick’s group isolated from the rest. Then some of Wheeler’s troopers galloped in from a side road, blocking the route Kilpatrick had to use.

  The cavalry general, according to one of his troopers, “seeing that he was cut off, led his men on at once in a charge with the saber and cut his way through.” A newsman on the scene for the Philadelphia Inquirer recorded that at one point the enemy riders were “not twenty-five yards from us firing their pistols as they came.” The New York Herald correspondent added that “only hard fighting and swift paces saved him; as it was he lost his hat, which the rebels use as a foundation for loud brags in [the] Augusta papers.” Kilpatrick’s abrupt charge carried along only the riders closest to him. A section of the 8th Indiana Cavalry was left behind in the rush, forcing these men to fight their own way out.

  Even as this formation of Yankee cavalrymen pounded down the narrow lane in their flight, squads of Confederates swarmed to the roadsides, some even forming along a bordering fence. Leroy S. Fallis was one of those who ran the gauntlet. Writing in 1903, the Hoosier said, “I have to this day a vivid remembrance of on this run looking into the muzzle of a revolver in the hand of a reb but a few feet away, and hearing the undesirable summons ‘Halt, you Yankee,’ but I did not halt until I had passed through the danger point. How rapidly thoughts passed through my brain on that occasion, and how quickly my thoughts were put into action. Believing my time had come, I sat almost straight in the saddle, again sending my spurs into my horse’s flanks to hasten his speed, if possible, so that when shot he might carry me out to the boys before I fell. The revolver clicked, but no discharge, and I was safe.”